adobe-fonts
Unnecessary differentiation for the component 又
I know there are tons of issues on glyph unifications and differentiations, but this one is extremely obvious and easy to solve. It is so absurd that I have no idea why Adobe did not realize it before releasing the font.
Currently, the component 又 has two forms: the open form used in JP/KR and the closed form used mainly in CN/HK/TW but also in JP/KR sometimes.
The two forms can be unified for several reasons.
Firstly, the standard glyphs in all regions show the closed form:
And the open form is also acceptable for CN, especially for bold fonts, Microsoft YaHei Bold as an example:
I am not sure whether the open form is acceptable for TW and HK, but the closed form is definitely acceptable for all regions.
In addition, there are characters where both CN and JP use the closed form, such as U+53CC 双 (the simplified form of 雙 used in both mainland China and Japan) and U+53CB 友, so current JP glyphs are not consistent:
Finally, Serif uses the closed form for all regions:
To choose one from the two forms to be used, I personally prefer the closed form, since it is used more widely in the current version, and is consistent with Serif.
My quick opinion. Source Han Sans was originally based off Kozuka Gothic which has the open 又 form, other than U+53CB 友 which is closed due to the presence of the left 丿 stroke touching the 又 component, so it could be a design choice. (CN glyphs highlighted in orange)
I believe that when designing Source Han Sans, the JP glyphs made by Adobe had to close the 又 for 皮 components to make it look cleaner, but if no stroke got in the way, they left it open. For CN glyphs, under Changzhou SinoType (back in 2014), they tried to adopt closed 又 forms for as many characters as possible, but had some inconsistency (for example U+652F 支), where the form is not fully closed (ExtraLight is, Heavy isn't)) with the 又 form.
The reason was likely because Changzhou SinoType did the glyphs as a rush job, so I feel the quality is poorer and inconsistent, so when talking about U+652F 支, it is only one part of the many inconsistencies CN glyphs have.
Also granted that a good amount of the common characters are using only CN glyphs for JP, KR and CN, rather than the unreleased JP glyphs which for some characters may have the open 又 form similar to Kozuka Gothic, which leads to some typeface design inconsistency. But that's just like digging deep into the rabbit hole so I'll stop here.
To choose one from the two forms to be used, I personally prefer the closed form, since it is used more widely in the current version, and is consistent with Serif.
And one final thing. Sans and Serif may have some stylistic design differences (example U+9001 送 with the drop 点 stroke in Serif rather than the sweeping 捺 stroke in Sans for the JP glyph), so I think I can accept this kind of discrepancy, so to me, the open 又 form is better, although it will be easier to have the closed form for all regions.
